It is a legendary 1960s moment. Captain America (Peter Fonda) and his biker pal, Billy (Dennis Hopper), collect the money from their drug deal, gun their Harleys and set out across the country to do their own thing. This stoned odyssey, like the decade that Easy Rider glorified, ends badly. Nevertheless, Hopper's movie was treated more as a healing ritual than an entertainment when it appeared in 1969. The early 1960s buzz was gone. America needed something for the hangover and instant nostalgia was just the thing. That nostalgia would be commercially mined for the following 25 years.
"The movie's sentimental paranoia obviously rang true its elegiac sense of American failure," film critic Pauline Kael writes of Easy Rider, "In the late 1960s, it was cool to feel you couldn't win, that everything was rigged and hopeless."
The feeling was understandable. A nation that was still absorbing the blow of President Kennedy's assassination five years earlier was further ruptured by the events of 1968. Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, Martin Luther King in Memphis. kF S73/8a"5w49.Z- Memphis. Race riots turned burning American cities into war zones and anti-Vietnam war protests scorched college campuses. Students at Kent State University were shot by their own National Guard.
"This generation of the world must choose," President Lyndon Johnson declared in 1965, "destroy or build, kill or aid, hate or understand." By the end of 1968, however, 500,000 American troops were bogged down in Vietnam, the war had entered its bloodiest phase and American confidence had been fatally wounded by the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive.
"Tet completed the process of disillusionment," historian Michael H. Hunt writes in Lyndon Johnson's War. "Many in the media were now turning against the war." And the media were increasingly influential in a television decade that could endlessly replay its pivotal moments: Jackie Kennedy scrambling on to the back of the moving car in Dallas, Jack Ruby stepping forward to shoot Oswald, corpses on a road in Vietnam, hippies in a field at Woodstock.
According to Charles Johnson, whose recently published novel, Dreamer, is based on the life of Martin Luther King jnr, the 1960s became "the first truly theatrical decade - so fluid, so polymorphous you could change your identity - reinvent yourself - as easily as you restyled your hair."
Getting "back to the garden," as Joni Mitchell advised in her 1969 anthem, Woodstock, did not seem impossible, even in 1968. But the Summer of Love lasted just one season - and its demise was not pretty. "Young people buying that image don't realise the scene at Haight-Ashbury changed rapidly," says Robin Dizard, a teacher from Berkeley, California. "The Mafia immediately moved in when it realised there was money to be made out of drugs there."
There was even more money to be made as the Summer of Love and Woodstock became distant but evocative memories for those who lived through them and fabled events for a younger generation. Signature tunes such as Satisfaction and My Generation have been used to sell everything from tights to dishwashing liquid. A three-day ticket to Woodstock in 1969 cost about $25 dollars. A
three-day ticket for Woodstock in 1994 cost almost $200. "This is a billion-dollar business," Jay Coleman of Rockbill Inc told Adweek magazine at the time. "It's not run by hippies smoking pot."
More recently, the new Volkswagen Beetle was launched with a sly advertising campaign that relied heavily on nostalgia for the "bug's" clunkier heyday. Even the bible of revolution - the Communist Manifesto - has been republished by Verso in a handsome edition that is being marketed by its publicists as a fashion accessory.
Oliver Stone, director of The Doors, JFK, Platoon and other harking-back-to-the-sixties films, is appalled by the exploitation of what he regards as his formative year, 1968. "I am repulsed by the junk food mentality that glorifies the 1960s," he told Rolling Stone magazine on the Summer of Love's 20th anniversary. "It was not a great time. There was intense pain. And now someone's going to come along with a television series called 1968 or something. I don't buy into it."
Mr Stone may not have much to buy into. The 30th anniversary of a tumultuous year has, so far, been allowed to slip by quietly in the US. There is nothing like the expected crop of "survivor memoirs" and remarkably few magazine articles open with the line "When I first met Jim Morrison/Janis Joplin/ . . ." American audiences have not yet demanded a television series called 1968, and nor have their children.
As Bob Dylan predicted, the times have indeed been a changin'. Dennis Hopper has given up crawling out on aircraft wings and Peter Fonda just published Don't Tell Dad, a sad rather than wild memoir. Easy riders who once mellowed out on pot now contemplate Viagra, their past heroes either dead, locked-up, sidetracked or in recovery. The 1960s may finally have passed their sell-by date.